In a long, and interesting speech, he characterized what the U.S. and other industrialized nations need to do to combat global warming this way: “We just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions ’cause we have to save the planet for our grandchildren.”

At a time that the nation is worried about a recession is that really the characterization his wife would want him making? “Slow down our economy”?

That sounds bad and it’s pretty much what we’d expect from the Clintons, who never met a socialist scheme they couldn’t make their own. And it involves global warming, which draws leftists like honey draws a Pooh Bear. Alas, the report doesn’t match the speech. In Tapper’s defense, what the former President did say was not particularly erudite and he wandered about a bit so you can forgive someone for not exactly getting the point. I had to read it a few times to figure it out myself (and so did others, to lesser degrees of success). Alas for the Clintons, it isn’t better than what is being reported, but if I’m going to beat him up for what he said – and I am – it’s only right to quote him accurately.

Read on after the jump.

Here’s the quote in full, from Tapper’s report:

Everybody knows that global warming is real…but we cannot solve it alone.”

“And maybe America, and Europe, and Japan, and Canada — the rich counties — would say, ‘OK, we just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions ’cause we have to save the planet for our grandchildren.’ We could do that.

“But if we did that, you know as well as I do, China and India and Indonesia and Vietnam and Mexico and Brazil and the Ukraine, and all the other countries will never agree to stay poor to save the planet for our grandchildren. The only way we can do this is if we get back in the world’s fight against global warming and prove it is good economics that we will create more jobs to build a sustainable economy that saves the planet for our children and grandchildren. It is the only way it will work.”

Now, he’s not saying that we should. But he’s not saying we shouldn’t either. He’s saying that most folks with more than a speck of common-sense already know: poor countries aren’t going to stay poor to “save the planet”.

Nor, by the way, should they. Why risk any nation’s economy on a crisis whose existence isn’t anywhere close to certain? Unless you’re more invested in a “global economy” than in your country or are a pie-eyed utopian, there’s no sense in doing so.

So while he’s not telling us to slow down our economy, he is telling us that we need to completely transform it and lash it tightly to government so it can work for a specific purpose that he’s decided is more noble than the its current purpose (that is, the purpose we the people have decided is improtant to us as individuals). He’s saying that we need to bend our entire economy toward creating “more jobs to build a sustainable economy” thus showing the rest of the world how to do it. Notice how he doesn’t particularly care of folks want those kinds of jobs or if employers want to provide those kinds of services or even if we consumers want those kinds of products. Oh no. He simply declares it an imperative and says that when his wife becomes President, that’s is how things will be, no matter what we want.

If that sounds a lot like the fascist models employed by Woodrow Wilson round about 1918 or so or Frankin Roosevelt in the 1930s that’s because they are. Inventing a crisis, mobilizing the entire nation to fight it as if it were an actual war, then using the coercive power of government to bend the private economy to “solving” that crisis is a step-by-step replay of some of the worst government this country has ever known. And it’s no shock that Bill Clinton wants to do the very same thing since from her earliest days as a politician, his wife was steeped in the waters of happy, smiley, “mommy fascism”.

So, no, Bill Clinton doesn’t want our economy to slow down. He just wants it entirely under his wife’s control. That’s not better, just different.